Wednesday, July 17, 2013

The White House tapes are public. Alexander P. Butterfield is brought in as a surprise witness to the Ervin Committee, where he reveals -- and the White House then confirms -- that "President Nixon had listening devices in the White House that would have automatically tape-recorded his conversations with John W. Dean 3rd and other key figures in the Watergate case."

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Sam Dash: Just one last question If one were therefore to reconstruct the conversations at any particular date, what would be the best way to reconstruct those conversations, Mr. Butterfield, in the President's Oval Office?

Butterfield: Well, in the obvious manner, Mr. Dash -- to obtain the tape and play it.

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The committee scheduled a meeting for later in the week to formally consider a request for the tapes; San Dash tells reporters that they will surely do so. By the end of the week, the committee had requested tapes -- as did Archibald Cox, who asked for eight specific tapes.

Key point here: the prosecutors and the committee focused on the conversations they knew about, which meant those which someone (such as Dean) had reported to them, or those which they had some other specific evidence about. Neither was about to try to force Nixon to turn over everything, in a wild goose chase. Even as a technical matter that wouldn't make much sense, but both legally and politically both Congress and Cox wanted to be very specific and very limited. All of which made sense -- but it also meant that many, many important conversations were never revealed during any of the Watergate proceedings. In short, we know a lot more than they did.

At the White House, Al Haig shuts off the system. The White House tapes are done.

And they then proceed with the big decision: what to do with the evidence.

Against? Haig, Haldeman, and Leonard Garment, who threatened to resign.

Garment (in addition to the sensible point that getting rid of hundreds of hours of old-fashioned audio tape wouldn't actually be all that easy), got it right: Nixon would surely be impeached for obstruction of justice if he destroyed evidence.

The blunt fact of it was that Nixon's best bet at this point was to win in the courts, thereby keeping the tapes from ever being seen. That might have seemed a longshot to the president's team, but as impossible a position as it was to say that the tapes would prove him innocent but he couldn't share them because of his responsibility to the presidency, it would have been even more untenable to claim that the tapes exonerated him but he had to burn them.

And impeachment -- clearly a very real possibility at this point -- was ultimately a political, not a legal, question. Even if Dean was proved more accurate than Nixon, and even if some other details came out from whichever tapes he would eventually have to surrender, it was always still possible that Republicans (or conservatives from both parties) would stick with him anyway.

Emery makes two other points about keeping the tapes. One is that they were potentially worth a lot of money, one way or another. But another point is that the tapes, as much as they incriminated Nixon, also promised him some measure of protection against others eventually turning on him. After all, Dean was basically telling the truth now, but what if he chose to add some lies to it -- or what if one of the others decided to lie about Nixon in order to save his own skin.

The bottom line, really, is that Nixon's job was to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." If he destroyed evidence in a criminal case, how could Congress not remove him from office?

And so Nixon keeps the tapes, and readies himself for the fight over them.

9 comments:

Your mention of Agnew reminded me that, yes, he's still in the picture and hasn't resigned yet. You also say that impeachment was a serious possibility, even at this point in the story.

I'm curious how Agnew's resignation plays into this? Come October, will there be a small Constitutional crisis as the very real possibility of Carl Albert becoming (Acting) President creeps up? When Ford was selected to replace Agnew, did everyone involved know there was a good chance they were selecting the next President?

It's been a very long time since I read Cohen and Witcover's A Heartbeat Away, a history of the Agnew investigation written shortly after the events. As I recall, though, people in the know weren't so worried about Carl Albert -- what greatly alarmed Eliot Richardson, the attorney general, was that Agnew himself might become president while prosecutors were sitting on hard evidence that he was hip-deep in bribery and extortion. (The guy was literally taking delivery of envelopes stuffed with cash in the vice-president's office.) To avert this, Richardson overruled his investigators and prosecutors and accepted the deal in which Agnew pleaded "no contest" to lesser counts and got no jail time -- way less of a penalty than ordinary crooks would get for the same offenses. But by then they knew there was a good chance of a Nixon impeachment, and the Justice Department also knew (by accident; they weren't investigating Agnew originally, but a corruption probe in Baltimore led to him) that they might actually be looking at almost simultaneous impeachments. Not exactly a constitutional crisis, maybe, but certainly a humongous mess.

I left something out. For the brief period that the investigation was publicly known before he resigned, Agnew was loudly proclaiming his innocence. Richardson's priority was to force him out of office so he didn't imminently become president. The plea deal achieved that, but the prosecutors assumed that without an actual guilty plea Agnew would go around saying he was the victim of a political witch-hunt. This in turn would encourage those who believed that Nixon was being witch-hunted as well. So the Justice Department also insisted on publishing the evidence they had against Agnew and would have brought to trial in a prosecution. This was a smart move that apparently worked, because Agnew went quietly after that.

Wow, thanks. That's great to know. I guess when your main concern is that Agnew might become President, the prospect of the top Democrat in Congress ascending to the Oval Office ain't so bad.

I wonder if there was any serious discussion of dropping Agnew from the ticket in 1972. Nixon must have been aware on some level of Agnew's deep troubles. There were rumors about his corruption even in 68. Why not replace Agnew with someone boring and not corrupt, like Gerald Ford?

Speaking of Ford, who really chose him for VP? The Democrats in Congress gave Nixon only his name when they listed the options. Did Nixon really care who his new VP would be? Did senior Republican party leadership care, or did they still believe that Nixon would survive Watergate?

Haldeman is out of the WH, but still in touch with the president. After all, he's really the chief co-conspirator in the cover-up of the cover-up. I believe that Haldeman also still had access to the tapes up to this point, to use preparing his defense.

Wow, I can still remember this. Absolutely the first time I paid any attention to politics/legal affair.

The confirmation that there were tapes of the Dean/Nixon conversions (that Nixon knew about and Dean didn't) absolutely convinced me that Nixon's version of events would be confirmed. Didn't occur to me that he'd try to keep anybody from hearing them (since they pretty much backed up Dean)

Wow, I can still remember this. Absolutely the first time I paid any attention to politics/legal affair.

The confirmation that there were tapes of the Dean/Nixon conversions (that Nixon knew about and Dean didn't) absolutely convinced me that Nixon's version of events would be confirmed. Didn't occur to me that he'd try to keep anybody from hearing them (since they pretty much backed up Dean)